Through my work with the Connected Women Leaders, I am witnessing the power of women coming together, sharing resources and shaping collective responses to global emergencies—like this week’s devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria.
I am sharing two of the many actions each of us can take to help alleviate the suffering and support the survivors.
Connected Women Leaders faculty members Michell Nunn, the president/CEO of CARE, and Gülseren Onanç, founder of the Equality, Justice Women Platform in Turkey, are working with their organizations to deliver aid, supplies and support to those affected by the earthquake.
Donate to CARE
As a member of CARE’s Global Leadership Council, I can assure assure you that the desperate stories continue as the situation worsens with aftershocks and the freezing conditions. The needs are enormous and CARE is on the ground responding. CARE has been in Turkey and Syria for more than 60 years with a staff team of 273, all of them impacted by this disaster, including two team members tragically lost. CARE is there now for the others who have lost family members and loved ones.
Right now the focus is on delivery of essential supplies in both Turkey and Syria, including water, sanitation and hygiene materials, tents, blankets, food, cash assistance and other emergency items. The streets are covered with snow, and people are left with the choice between the risk of staying inside a structure that could collapse at any moment or the risk of sleeping outside in freezing temperatures. Many families opt to stay in their cars, running their engines all night to stave off the cold. Others are crowded into temporary shelters that have sprung up over the past three days. In many places, water, gas and electricity are limited-to-nonexistent.
Here’s some of the latest news from CARE’s team: Turkey and Syria: “The situation before the earthquake was dire, catastrophic – and now it is even more so”
With an impending winter snowstorm expected in the coming days, it is critical that we raise and deploy funds as quickly as possible.
Donate to CARE's Turkey and Syria Earthquake Response.
Donate to Turkish Philanthropy Funds
Gülseren Onanç, founder of SES Equality and Solidarity Association and the Equality, Justice and Women platform in Turkey, has also organized a way to get funds directly to women and children survivors. Turkish Philanthropy Funds is distributing money to Gülseren’s organization, SES Equality and Solidarity Association, and other TPF-vetted grassroots organizations already working in Turkey, such as AKUT Vakfi, Ahbap, ACEV, TOG, İhtiyaç Haritası, TEGV, and Women’s Foundation (KAMER), that are directly involved in all the affected cities to help victims recover from the devastating effects of the earthquake and rebuilding efforts.
If you can, please help and please share this email widely with friends and colleagues, and post links on your social platforms about these and other organizations also responding to the humanitarian crisis.
Natural disasters may take different forms, but what we are witnessing and learning is that there are also human errors contributing to the huge losses of lives and livelihoods, homes and health—errors like short-term thinking that bypass building codes to optimize profits and infrastructure compromises in emergency services, water and power that must be approached more sustainably.
Disasters like this one remind us that we are all connected on one fragile earth, and what happens anywhere can happen everywhere!
Connecting for the good we can do in such times, is a recognition of our shared humanity.
With gratitude for all those stepping forward with support.
- Pat
